Thursday, July 28, 2011

Recently, several psychologists, perhaps most notably Jonathan Haidt and his collaborators, have emphasized the connection between disgust and moral condemnation. Inducing disgust -- whether by hypnosis, rubbish, or fart spray -- tends to increase the severity of people's moral condemnation. Positive odors have an effect, too: Evidently, shopping-mall passersby are more likely to agree to break a dollar when approached near a pleasant-smelling bakery than when approached near a neutral-smelling store. Joshua Greene's work suggests that people have swift emotional reactions to hypothetical scenarios like smothering a noisy baby to save a roomful of hiding people, and that these emotional reactions drive moral judgments which are then clothed in reasons post-hoc. Similarly, perhaps, we find sex with a frozen chicken revolting and so morally condemn it, even if we can find no rational basis for that condemnation.

Now one possible interpretation of such results is that we have a moral module whose outputs are influenced by factors like odor and the cuteness of babies. After all, moral judgments, according to most philosophers and moral psychologists, are one thing and aesthetic judgments are another, even if the one affects the other. Philosophers have long recognized several different and distinct types of norms: moral norms, aesthetic norms, prudential norms, and epistemic norms, for example. Sometimes it is held that these different norms constrain each other in some way: For example, perhaps the immoral can never truly be beautiful or in one's self-interest, or maybe there's a moral obligation to be epistemically rational. But even if one norm is in the end completely subsumed by another, wherever there is a multiplicity of norm-types, philosophers generally treat those norms as sharply conceptually distinct.

Another possibility, though, it seems to me, is that norms mush together, not just causally (with aesthetic judgments affecting moral judgments, as a matter of psychological fact) and not just via philosophically-discovered putative contingencies (e.g., the immoral is never beautiful), but into a blurry mess where the existence of a normative judgment, maybe even a normative fact, is clear but in which the type of normativity is not best conceptualized in terms of distinct categories. This is not just the ordinary claim that normative judgments can be multi-faceted. "Facets" are by nature sharply distinct. Someone who holds to the sharp distinctness of different types of normativity might still accept, presumably will accept, that a normative judgment might have more than one dimension, e.g., an epistemic and a moral dimension. Racism might be, for example, epistemically irrational and immoral and ugly, with each of these facts a distinct facet of its counternormativity. My thought, however, is that many of our normative judgments, and perhaps also many normative facts, might not be as sharply structured as that.

(Calvin's father answers the phone at work. Calvin says, "It surrrrre is nice outside! Climb a tree! Goof off!". In the last panel Calvin says to Hobbes, "Dad harasses me with his values, so I harass him with mine.")

Is Calvin urging a certain set of moral values on his father? Or is it rather that Calvin sees prudential value in climbing trees and hopes to win his father over to a similar prudential evaluation? Or is this something more like an aesthetic worldview of Calvin's? Psychologically, I don't know that there needs to be some particular mix, in Calvin, of moral or prudential or aesthetic dimensions to his normative judgment. Need there be a fine-grained fact of the matter? Furthermore, let's suppose that Calvin is right and his father should climb a tree and goof off. What kind of "should" or blend of shouldishness is at issue? Need it be the case that the normativity is X% moral and Y% prudential? Or prudential rather than moral? Or definitely both but for distinct (if possibly overlapping) metaphysical reasons?

My core thought is this: The psychology of normativity might be a mushy mess of attractions and repulsions, of pro and con attitudes, not well characterized by sharp distinctions between the philosophers' several types of normativity. And to the extent that real normative facts are grounded in such psychological facts, they might inherit this mushiness.

14 comments:

@ Anon, Jul 28 10:30: That's a doozy! For the purposes of this post let it suffice that I accept (a.) there are normative facts, (b.) an important part of the ("metaphysical") ground of norms is facts about human psychology, and so (c.) learning about (b) is an important part of the epistemic story in learning about (a).

(b) and (c) might seem relatively appealing for aesthetic norms and (a) perhaps in doubt, while for norms of logic (b) and (c) might seem highly problematic. But as I emphasized in the post, I want to blur the distinction between those different types of normativity.

If you're willing to "go mushy" for normative facts, why not do the same for the normative/non-normative distinction? It seems to me, ala John McDowell, that "danger" is a concept where one cannot easily distinguish the normative (moral/prudential, I guess) from the empirical. Phenomenologically speaking, there does not seem to me to be a great deal of difference between many "thick" normative concepts and regular empirical ones.

Of course, mushiness does not entail that there are distinctions to be made between the types of normativity (or, on my suggestion, normative and empirical), just that separating them in particular cases does not make any sense and our theories somehow have to account for their proclivity to mush.

But even if outputs of our moral modules are influenced by factors like odor and cuteness our being aware of this fact just makes identifying unmushy judgment more complicated. Noticing this influence is like noticing any irrelevant influence. The mush doesn't seem irremediable. I don't see why moral normativity can't be sharply distinguished from other norms in principle, and where it seems very difficult, why not put it down to fallibility rather than the mushiness of the norms?

Hi Eric, it might be worthwhile noting that this kind of a view seems to fit well with work by medieval philosophers, e.g. Aquinas, on transcendentals--being, one, true, and good. I mean, they don't say *exactly* what you're saying but they would (I think) agree that norms are mushy and explain the mushiness of norms by the transcendental nature of properties like 'goodness' or 'truth'

I was searching for something online that would explain to me the images that I sometimes see when my eyes are closed. So far, your blog is the closest. It occurs most often when I am about to fall asleep or just before fully wakening. I see thousands of small totally misc. images usually in black and white constantly and rapidly changing. In the sequence, sometimes I will see bursts of bright light turning off and on in different places in my visual field. Usually during these episodes, photographic images will pop up like a car, or a face in full color like I am looking at a photograph or a video. I have told a few people about this and they think I am nuts. This has only been happening for about 5 years. I enjoy being in this state and I will work to prolong or intensify the images. I am not on any medications other than Prozac 40 mg a day. Am I crazy? Do I have a brain tumor? Have you ever had anyone report something like this?

I guess I think the compelling reasons against mushiness are moral reasons. How else could an ethical norm work if it couldn't ethically judge any fact about human psychology? Even in a world where it was a fact that all psychologies enjoyed torture, all that would entail would be that the normative facts about the wrongness of torturing people would be difficult to establish.This is something that perhaps there is evidence for; psychological facts that links pleasure and eating animals make the ethical norm against eating animals difficult to access. Doesn't mushiness threaten the counterfactual function of norms?

Thanks for the comment! I'm inclined to think the problem you mention arises for psychological naturalism generally. It's a big issue, of course! But I suspect that mushiness doesn't add too much to that worry in addition. One thing to remember: mushy distinction doesn't mean no distinction.

I guess I'm getting trapped by the fallacy of the simple question whereby I'm saying I want clear yes or no answers and your mushiness is about doubting any motivation except prejudice for wanting that. But I guess my attitude is that of Sorenson when he deals with vagueness. He thinks that psychologically its uncontroversial that we believe that there are no sharp borderlines - and he has loads of reasons why we have these beliefs and many of these are naturalistic eg we've evolved to have limited search spaces and so rounding up is a survival thing etc. But he resists the move from recognising these naturalistic pressures to the move that we should trust them. He sets up theories of meaning ( those that explain the vagueness at face value) and classical logic and just says we should go with classical logic over meaning theory because its just more succesful. So he's not denying the role of naturalism in giving us the pheneomenon ( in this case vagueness, in your case mushiness of norms) but he's giving a principled reason nevertheless for not taking the phenomenon at face value. Incredulity is the result ( he calls this the meta-sorites) and Tim Williamson when you stare at him in disbelief just stares back. So why should we in principle analyse mushiness in terms of the clear entanglements of moral beliefs? Why not make a similar Sorensonian move?